Posts from — June 2007

Cycad plant with cone - from a walk around the neighborhood

A thought that occurred to me on my walk this morning (maybe reading this interesting biography of Philip K. Dick, and this interesting article - Divine Interference - about him last night influenced me):

How does biological information differ from computer information?
How are they defined in those respective fields?

Why have a joined the Brave New World of Blogging? I avoided it for many years because I was concerned it would be too time-consuming. For starters, I already write in a journal every morning as part of my daily routine, and often write in it during the day (and night). So, I thought also writing in a blog would just add to the already long (non-money-making) list of things I do everyday, and I would be repeating content - writing double as it were - and I already felt a little guilty about all the time I get “distracted” by my curiosity, passions, interests and creative activities.

However, the reality is … more complex than that. (Reality often is). What happens is, I get interested in some topic, and spend time researching, thinking, surfing the web, saving notes and links, AND THEN, email friends about what I’ve discovered, uncovered, or created (such as photos or writings). This process of emailing different friends is repetitive: I don’t just cc: (”carbon copy”) the email, because different friends are different, with different interests, and I don’t want them to feel they were just part of a mass emailing anyway. That emailing process is repetitive of the journal writing anyway, and repetitive with the various emails I send to different audiences.

Not only that, but later I often want to find the reference to a link I sent to some friend, and have to sort or sift or search through old emails or journals to find it. Blogging software uses a database to save everything, and has search capabilities. Links are part of blog posts. As are photos. So it seems a natural solution.

I can also reach a much wider audience - both those people I already know, and anyone that finds their way here, or who I give the link to.

So … I investigated various Content Management Systems (CMS) besides WordPress (one of the two blogging packages my ISP offers to install for free), with names like Drupal, Joomla, and XOOPS. Sounds like the name of juicebars or candy, eh? I decided to stop messing around and try WordPress. I’ve tended to get bogged down in research in the past when I was looking into blogging and wanting to use a software package on my server instead of one of the services out there such as Blogger.

In the process of research I did get sidetracked this time – though in a good way – learning about such things as “cruft”, “Permalink” and the “MetaWeblog” API. I also saw terms that I’ve learned recently like “pingback” and “trackback” when I was researching “splogging”.
Why was I researching splogging? Well, that’s a long story.